Hackers hijack internet voting system in Washington DC

An internet voting system designed to allow District of Columbia residents to cast absentee ballots has been put on hold after computer scientists exploited vulnerabilities that would have allowed them to rig elections and view secret data.

The system, which was paid for in part by a $300,000 federal grant, was hijacked just 36 hours after Washington DC elections officials began testing it ahead of live elections scheduled for next month. Scientists from the University of Michigan pulled off the hack to demonstrate the inherent insecurity of net-based voting.

“None of this will come as a surprise to internet security experts, who are familiar with the many kinds of attacks that major websites suffer from on a daily basis,” one of the scientists, J. Alex Halderman, wrote on Tuesday on the Freedom to Tinker blog. “It may someday be possible to build a secure method for submitting ballots over the internet, but in the meantime, such systems should be presumed to be vulnerable based on the limitations of today's security technology.”

The pilot system, which was built on open-source software, was deployed a week ago Tuesday, and just 36 hours later, the team was able to take full control of it. Even though their attack caused computers that were used to cast votes to play their alma mater's fight song, it took elections officials until Friday to suspend the site.

It has since been reinstated, but residents can use it only to download ballots that they can print and return by postal mail. Internet voting has been suspended.

The voting application was written on the Ruby on Rails framework and ran on top of the Apache web server and the MySQL database. The scientists were able to hijack the system after they discovered that they could upload ballots with almost any string they wanted. By inserting Unix commands into the file names, they were able to take “almost total control of the server software, including the ability to change votes and reveal voters' secret ballots,” Halderman said.

A file named “ballot.$(sleep 10)pdf,” for instance, caused the server to pause for 10 seconds. They used similar techniques to install a backdoor on the system that allowed them almost unfettered system access.

DC officials deployed the system even after Common Cause and a group of computer scientists and election-law experts warned city officials that the trial posed an unacceptable security risk that "imperils the overall accuracy of every election on the ballot,” The Washington Postreported. Among other shockers in Halderman's post is the revelation that highly secret data, including the database username and password, were stored on the server. ®

Bootnote

No, we never said the gaping holes that were exploited stemmed from the open-source software. FOSS fanbois can now stand down.